Sustainable Tourism Law

38 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW UNWTO defines tourism as follow: “ Tourism comprises the activities of persons traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes ”. Tourism Law Tourism Law originates from an array of Statutes, that, over the course of time, has regulated some aspects of tourism-connected activities, such as hotel, travel and leisure travel, cruises, travel contracts, and so on. As we will see, in Italy the first Law connected to tourism goes back to 1910, but precedents may even be found in ancient Roman Law. These ensembles of laws and regulations were, at a certain moment, collected and organized in a body of rules called “Touristic Legislation”. “Touristic Legislation” was an ensemble of sectoral statutes or regulations, as regards spot interventions in various sectors connected to, but not coordinated with, touristic activities. The increasing economic importance of Tourism, and the increasing number of tourists travelling all over the world, induced some Scholars to reconsider the entire subject matter, in order to find and build a common base for a unitary approach: Tourism Law. Tourism Law, in the modern sense, was born and has been growing as an interdisciplinary law. It has distanced itself from its origins mainly based on public law, by gradually giving way to private autonomy and penetrating into traditional civil law categories and creating new ones. Modern Tourism Law is an interdisciplinary branch of the law; a systematic set of rules whose ingredients are civil and administrative law. It originates from public law, with a currently obsolete definition of “Touristic Legislation”. Modern Tourism Law Outlining the development of Tourism Law is not an easy task. It’s a new system of rules. It is a complex law, strongly linked to interdisciplinary studies. It is made up of civil institutes and public and administrative components, rules of private law and rules of administrative law. It assumes organizational structures of regional law that interact with private lawsubjects. Subjects are companies, enterprises, public institutions, administrative local entities and, of course, consumers. It is governed by EU rules protecting the consumer traveller. It interacts with health laws, with the right of transportation and with the regulation of professions. It embeds itself into the discipline of agricultural enterprise, in relation to the widespread phenomenon of agritourism